reflections at the intersection of American history, religion, politics, and academic life

As I continue to work through some of the Hamilton soundtrack in preparation for my Fall 2019 course “Age of Hamilton” at Messiah College, I found Seth Rudestsky‘s breakdown of “The Schuyler Sisters” to be very entertaining and really informative. I know this has little to do with the historical interpretation of the show, but I still love it. I think I am becoming a Broadway fan!

Hey @nytimes did you even watch the video? In your effort to do a “both sides” story you failed to report the facts. Read @lisasharper timeline b/c you missed A LOT. Really problematic coverage. https://t.co/jjB8XRUqVw

1) I second this AND a) I call BS on the idea that they just burst into cheers randomly. If they were at pro-life March and someone was speaking would they break into cheers to counter it? No. B/c it’s disrespectful. https://t.co/EIsVjxW2rn

Re #CovingtonHighSchool: I will be happy to apologize for condemning the actions of the students if it turns out that they were somehow acting as good and moral Christians. The last thing I want is to see Catholic schools and Catholic students held in any disrepute. 1/

Because it seems like that there are now three narratives. First, students jeer at a Native American elder (and Vietnam Vet) after the March for Life. This is what horrified many people. And, frankly, a group of taunting high school students seemed to speak for itself. But… 3/

A second narrative is that students themselves were being jeered at by another group. That counter-narrative prompted some apologies today from some who had, like me, strongly condemned the students. 4/

But it’s very hard to square that second narrative with the apology from the school itself, and the Diocese of Covington, who would presumably have known, from first-hand reports and eyewitnesses, if the students’ actions had been somehow misrepresented. 5/

Now, a third narrative has emerged, thanks to the Detroit Free Press and other sources, which reports that Mr. Phillips, the elder, interposed himself between two jeering groups, chanting to bring peace. At which point the Covington students then turned their ire on him. 6/

Where does this leave us? First, a comment about the March for Life, which I support. The gross over-politicization of this religious event, and its increasing reliance on political figures to draw crowds, is unnecessary, irreligious and dangerous. 7/

Second, a more practical, pastoral, concern: where were the chaperones? The idea that a group of Catholic high school students appeared to have been placed, wittingly or unwittingly, in such an incendiary situation, seems to indicate a lack of oversight. 8/

Third, Rashomon-like, we may never know exactly what happened and the various “sides” may continue to disagree and condemn one another. But I hope the truth emerges and apologies are forthcoming. Mine will be, if necessary. If necessary, I hope the students’ will be as well. 9/

Until then, a willingness to learn and dialogue are essential. Dialogue among Covington High School administrators. Between Covington students and Indigenous Peoples. Between that group of students and Mr. Phillips. 10/

Another essential lesson, which transcends whatever happened in Washington this weekend: an understanding of the appalling treatment that Native Americans have endured in our country. That lesson needs to be learned regardless of what you think of Covington High School. 12/

This Teachable Moment can offer us, if we are both open and humble, important lessons about racism and marginalization, about dialogue and encounter, and about truth and reconciliation, during this coming week, which is, believe it or not, Catholic Schools Week. 13/13

As for me, I stand by all of my points above. Let me reiterate them again with some additional commentary:

These boys were in D.C. for the Right to Life march. They should be commended for this, but their behavior (no matter which narrative of the event you choose to believe) in this incident was not life-affirming.

These students seemed to have missed this connection. Were they harassed by the Black Hebrew Israelites? Yes. The video shows this. I do not condone the behavior or the way that this group verbally attacked the boys. But the boys (and apparently their chaperones) response seemed to be more rooted in the culture wars than in Christian teaching about turning the other cheek.

Whatever narrative of the incident you choose to follow, Covington Catholic School has failed these boys to some degree.

Whatever narrative of the incident you choose to follow, MAGA hats and shirts are offensive. They are especially offensive to people of color. The belief system behind the phrase “Make America Great Again” stands in opposition to Catholic social teaching. I made this case in Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump.

I thus stand by my previous statement that Trump is partly to blame for what happened here.

I stand by what I wrote above.

I stand by what I wrote above.

Let me also add that I am not interpreting this incident in the context of free speech or the First Amendment. I am interpreting it in light of Christian teaching, a set of beliefs that does not endorse certain kinds of speech when it violates the moral values that the church upholds.

So @tonyromo has one year left on his CBS contract. How much money did he make himself yesterday? Can’t imagine CBS letting him hit open market, will get John Madden money. Especially after he calls Super Bowl in two weeks.

…we go astray when we think of our task primarily as “overcoming bias.” For me, the fundamental problem we have may best be described as an orientation of the will: we suffer from a settled determination to avoid thinking. Relatively few people want to think. Thinking can force us out of familiar, comfortable habits; thinking can complicate our lives; thinking can set us at odds, or at least complicate our relationships, with those we admire or love or follow.

Fillmore, Pierce, and Johnson were sitting presidents seeking reelection who failed to win the nomination of their political party. And it almost happened in 1980 as Ted Kennedy challenged Jimmy Carter for the Democratic Party nomination.

The heightened anxiety of the time—from gas lines, to rising costs for basic goods, to unemployment—was reflected in the public’s desire for a stronger form of leadership in the White House. More than half of the country—55 percent—still thought Carter was honest in a June CBS News/New York Times poll. But 66 percent said they wanted someone “who would step on some toes and bend some rules to get things done.” Democrats in the poll overwhelmingly said they wanted Kennedy to be their nominee in 1980, with 52 percent for Kennedy to 23 percent for Carter, and 8 percent for California Gov. Jerry Brown.

Beyond economics, Americans were worried that their country was “in deep and serious trouble” because of “moral threats which cut right through the social fabric,” according to one survey by Democratic pollster Peter Hart in Wisconsin. Hart’s results showed widespread concern over “a lack of morality and religion and the breakdown of the family structure.” People said they were “afraid that people have become too selfish and greedy, that the people are apathetic and just don’t care.”

Hart’s survey in Wisconsin showed a desire for “a reemergence of the more traditional approach to life and a turning away from the more publicized free-wheeling attitudes of the 1960’s and 70’s.” This should have given the Carter White House some reassurance that Kennedy, whose life bore all the hallmarks of excess and privilege, might not be as formidable a foe as the polls showed. But when things are going badly and you’re getting blamed, it’s hard to think clearly, and the Carter White House was spooked.

The New York Times columnist Tom Wicker noted that many of those polled about Kennedy supported him despite holding less liberal views than he did on health care and government spending. “He is a glamorous figure with a great name,” Wicker wrote. “Those who are trying to draft him are looking for a winner.”

Carter remained publicly defiant about his political future, despite his tanking popularity. One day after the June numbers appeared, he hosted several dozen congressmen at the White House for a briefing on the Panama Canal treaty, which was struggling to gain support. The House members were seated at round tables, in groups of ten or so. Carter went from table to table. While he spoke to one group, he was asked by Representative Toby Moffett of Connecticut how he felt about the 1980 election. Carter claims that Moffett asked him if he was even going to run for reelection, “which was kind of an insult to an incumbent president.”

“Of course I am,” Carter told Moffett.

Moffett persisted. “What about Ted Kennedy?” he asked.

“I’m going to whip his ass,” Carter said.

Representative William Brodhead, a Michigan Democrat, was taken aback.

“Excuse me, what did you say?” he said.

Moffett cut him off. “I don’t think the president wants to repeat what he said,” he told Brodhead.

JF: What led you to write Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories that Give Us Meaning?

RH: At the national meeting of the American Academy of Religion that convened in Chicago in 2012, I was one of five scholars who responded to James Cone’s new book, The Cross and the Lynching Tree. As part of my comments, I spoke of the five national myths that I identify in my earlier book, Myths America Lives By (Illinois, 2003), and how those myths shaped my understanding of both the nation and race when I was growing up in West Texas some sixty years ago. When I completed my remarks and took my seat at the panelists’ table, one of the panelists—the late Professor James Noel of San Francisco Theological Seminary—leaned over to me and whispered, “Professor, you left out the most important of all the American myths!” When I asked what I had omitted, he told me straight up, “The myth of white supremacy.” That simple comment launched me on quite a journey of reading, reflection, and introspection. In time I began to see Noel’s point, that even whites like me—whites who strongly resist racist ideology—can escape the power of the white supremacist myth only with extraordinary effort, if at all. That is because assumptions of white supremacy are like the very air we breathe: they surround us, envelope us, and shape us, but do so in ways we seldom discern.

JF: In two sentences, what is the argument of Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories that Give Us Meaning?

RH: The book draws three conclusions—first, that the myth of white supremacy is the primal American myth that informs all the others; second, that one of the chief functions of the other myths is to protect and obscure the myth of white supremacy, to hide it from our awareness, and to assure us that we remain innocent after all; and third, that there is hope, but only if whites are willing to come to terms with this reality. An important sub-theme in this book is the role white churches in America have played in perpetuating the doctrine of white supremacy since the birth of the nation—and especially now

JF: Why do we need to read Myths America Lives By: White Supremacy and the Stories that Give Us Meaning?

RH: As far as I know, no other book systematically explores the mythic structure of American identity and roots that mythic structure squarely in the myth of white supremacy.

JF: When and why did you decide to become an American historian?

RH: I was raised in a very narrow, sectarian Christian tradition that claimed to be the one true church. My deeply held, existential questions about those claims first led me into the history of American religion. In time I saw unmistakable parallels between the sectarian dimensions of my church and the sectarian dimensions of my nation, and the mythic structures that sustained both

JF: What is your next project?

RH: Sidney E. Mead was widely recognized as the dean of historians of American religion and was my teacher at the University of Iowa. Mead always claimed that the Enlightenment stood at the heart of the American experience. Much later, a group of evangelical historians placed American evangelicalism at the heart of the American experience. I want to do a project that compares the work of Mead and the work of the evangelical historians on the way those two traditions helped shape the American experience.

Hence the concept of identity as it is now understood would not even rise in most traditional human societies. For much of the last ten thousand years of human history, the vast majority of people lived in settled agrarian communities. In such societies, social roles are both limited and fixed: a strict hierarchy is based on age and gender; everyone has the same occupation (farming or raising children and minding a household); one’s entire life is lived in the same village with a limited circle of friends and neighbors; one’s religion and beliefs are shared by all; and social mobility–moving away from the village, choosing a different occupation, or marrying someone not chosen by one’s parents–is virtually impossible. Such societies have neither pluralism, nor diversity, nor choice. Given this lack of choice , it did not make sense for an individual to sit around and brood over the question “Who am I, really ?” All of these characteristics that make up an inner self are fixed.

Hi I’m a historian. You may know me from my greatest hits including. ‘No, I haven’t seen that on The History Channel’, ‘Im not sure who the 23rd president was off the top of my head and ‘I don’t really know that much about the Panzer tank to be honest’ https://t.co/ubcB0SFJGU

Com-mon-place book: (noun): “a book into which notable extracts from works are copied for personal use.”

Let’s give this a try. Every now and then I will post a quote or very short excerpt from a book I am reading. Some of these will be related to American history or American religious history, but others will come from books I am reading outside of my field. They will be pretty random.

Baylor University scholar Alan Jacobs reflects on Mike Pence and the journalists who cover him:

VP Mike Pence says, “Criticism of Christian education in America must stop.” No it musn’t. Nobody and nothing is above criticism. Demanding that others stop criticizing your preferred group is a cheap identity-politics move. It would simply be a good thing if the critics made some effort to understand what they’re criticizing, though of course that’s not going to happen. I can’t imagine a cohort less likely to inform itself about conservative Christianity than the cohort of American journalists.

My caveat: There is a growing number of excellent journalists covering the religion beat who do try to understand conservative Christianity.

When I read the preface of Exiles from Eden in 1999 I was hooked. Here is Schwehn:

On a spring evening in 1982, I sat in a circle of my colleagues from the University of Chicago and from other institutions of higher learning in the Chicago area. We were meeting together as the Chicago Group on the History of the Social Sciences, convened by Professor George Stocking of the Anthropology Department. We had all read a paper prepared by one of the members of the group, and roughly eight of the twelve or so of us had arrived to discuss it. The paper, like most of those presented to the group, examined some aspect of the professionalization of the social sciences. I remember little else about the setting that evening, except that I was was sitting directly to the right of Professor Stocking.

While we were waiting for the remainder of the expected participants to straggle into our midst, someone (I think it was Peter Novick, but I cannot be sure) made the following proposal: “We’ve just recently filed our income tax forms; let’s move around the circle from left to right and indicate what each of us wrote under the heading ‘occupation'” This simple exercise was thought to have potentially profound and self-revealing implications. And so it proved.

The first person spoke up at once with a kind of brisk confidence. “Sociologists,” he said. And so it continued–“anthropologist,” “historian,” “psychologist,” “historian.” At about this point (though I have sometimes been slow to catch the drift of things, I did discern this time a clear pattern emerging), I began to wonder whether or not I had the courage to be honest in the company of so many of my senior colleagues.

Though trained as an intellectual historian, I had never once thought to put such a designation down under “occupation” on my tax form. When I finally spoke up, I admitted (it certainly felt like an admission) that I had written “college teacher” under the relevant heading. This disclosure was greeted with what I can only describe (thought it was doubtless a projection even then) as a combination of mild alarm and studied astonishment. I felt as thought I had suddenly become, however briefly, an informant from another culture.

The present book accordingly begins by unpacking one commonplace of academic life–the mysterious complaint, “I don’t have enough time to do my own work“–and by engaging one of the most closely argued and most culturally influential accounts of the academic calling ever written, Max Weber “Academics as a Vocation.” My study of Weber’s account of the academic calling led me to investigate the larger subject of this book, the relationship between religion and higher education. The logic of the problem of vocation impelled me in this direction, because Weber, in the course of his statement of the academic calling, self-consciously transmuted a number of terms and ideas that were religion in origin and implication. Even so, my interest in the relationship between religion and higher learning was and remains really more of a chronological matter than a strictly logical one. Indeed, the title of this book Exiles from Eden: Religion and the Academic Vocation in America, is, as they say, another story.

Later in 1982 I resigned my position at the University of Chicago, after eight years of teaching there, and I accepted an appointment in the honors college of Valparaiso University. I did this for several reasons, but perhaps the main one of them was that I found that I could pursue my own sense of the academic vocation more fully and responsibly at Valparaiso than I could at Chicago. Valparaiso is a church-related university, and Chicago is not. Valparaiso therefore strives to keep certain questions alive, such as questions about the relationship between religious faith and the pursuit of truth, that were then and still are close to the center of my understanding of the meaning of academic life. In brief, I sought to think through the problem of the academic vocation in part by living through it.

This story is the stuff of legend at Valparaiso University and, more specifically, in the Lilly Fellows Program in Humanities and the Arts housed on its campus. Schwehn, whose 1978 Stanford dissertation on Henry Adams and William James won the Allen Nevins Prize, spent the rest of his career at Valparaiso and Exiles from Eden became the unofficial mission statement of the Lilly Fellows Program.

The questions Schwehn raised in this book are still alive and continue to shape the careers of young scholars in the humanities and the arts. Seventeen years after my Valparaiso sojourn (2000-2002), I continue to try to think through academic vocation “in part by living through it.”

I don’t know if the evangelical writer Os Guinness voted for Donald Trump or supports all of this policies, but I think it’s fair to say that he thinks Trump’s critics are misguided. Here is Christian Postpiece on Guinness’s recent appearance with court evangelical Eric Metaxas:

Guinness said he agreed with Metaxas on his assessment, saying that he believed anti-Trump evangelicals and Catholics “haven’t analyzed the situation rightly.”

“They’ve become obsessed with Trump, and they’ve failed to see that he’s not the cause of the problem, he’s the consequence, the symptom,” Guinness responded.

“While they’re being obsessed with him, the real problems are developing underneath. And Trump won’t be forever. So he serves out two full terms and finishes in whatever way. Then you would still have the problem.”

Actually, I think some evangelicals have analyzed the situation rightly. They see both the serious problems with Trump and the longer-term problems that Trump represents. In my book Believe Me: The Evangelical Road to Donald Trump, I took a very long view of Trump’s rise among evangelicals. My analysis was driven by my understanding of American religious history. I am an anti-Trumper because I have tried to analyze the situation.

Here’s more from the Christian Post piece:

Labeling many of the evangelical and Catholic critics “friends” of both himself and Metaxas, Guinness went on to state that he felt they were “dead wrong” about their focus on Trump.

Metaxas then added that he found it “horrifying” that many of these evangelical critics of Trump were “demonizing” supporters of the president, arguing that their statements prevent civil discourse.

As a Trump critic, I am not trying to “demonize” anyone. I just want people like Eric Metaxas to use his platform to speak out against the incompetence and immorality of this president. And when I say “immorality” I do not only mean Stormy Daniels. I mean the nativism, misogyny, and racist comments and policies. Let’s remember that Metaxas, among many other things, defended Trump’s Charlottesville comments.

More from the Christian Post:

“They think that everyone who is a sane person must be viciously against Trump. If you’re not that, then you’re not part of the crowd anymore. And so, you can’t even talk to those people,” continued Metaxas.

Guinness believed that Christians needed to adopt “a better analysis of what’s gone wrong” in the United States and to “respond to it in a much more Christian way” than attacking Trump supporters.

Better public discourse can emerge if Americans would “get it out of just the obsession with Trump” to better think about pressing issues, like whether to build a wall on the southern border, Guinness added.

“You think of the wall and the fact that here’s a position which so many of the leading Democrats supported themselves, for the right reasons, not that long ago,” said Guinness. “Now because Trump’s in favor of it, they can’t possibly admit anything like that. Well, this is an insanity for the nation.”

Am I reading this correctly? Does Os Guinness favor the Trump’s border wall?

Here are the results of the latest National Public Radio/PBS/Marist poll:

A new NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist poll finds Trump’s approval rating down and his disapproval rating up from a month ago. He currently stands at 39 percent approve, 53 percent disapprove — a 7-point net change from December when his rating was 42 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove.

And the movement has come from within key portions of his base. He is:

Down significantly among suburban men, a net-positive approval rating of 51-to-39 percentto a net-negative of 42 percent approve, 48 percent disapprove. That’s a net change of down 18 percentage points.

Down a net of 13 points among white evangelicals, from 73-to-17 percent approve to 66-to-23 percent approve.

Down a net of 10 points among Republicans,from 90-to-7 percent approve to 83-to-10 percent.

Down marginally among white men without a college degree, from 56-to-34 percent approve to 50-to-35 percent approve, a net change downward of 7 points.